Claims made by Irving

8.29 The extracts relied on by the Defendants are as follows:

(i) Toronto, - 13th August 1988

'And this is, again, not just a wild hypothesis that I toss at you after just doing one month's work in the archives, this is in fact the result of work done by Paul Norris one of Zündel's men...In the British archives Paul Norris found documents which he showed me in photostat, showing quite clearly that British intelligence deliberately masterminded the gas chamber lie. I am not saying it was the same gas chamber lie that they masterminded, but it was a gas chamber lie. 1942, 1943, 1944 the Joint Intelligence Committee deliberated with the Psychological Warfare Executive which they ran in London, the propaganda agency in London,..on ways of blackening the German name, on ways of enraging allied soldiers so that they would fight even harder. And one of the methods that they hit on in the Psychological Warfare Executive, it's there in the documents, to say let us say that the Germans are using gas chambers to get rid of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other minority groups in Germany. And the minutes go to and fro...In one memorandum, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, writes a handwritten minute to this effect: 'we have had a good run for our money with this gas chamber story we have been putting about, but don't we run the risk that eventually we are going to be found out and when we are found out the collapse of that lie is going to bring down the whole of our psychologicalwarfare effort with it. So isn't it rather time now to let it drift off by itself and concentrate on other lines that we're running'. 'We had a good run for our money' he writes in 1944 and here we are 44 years later and that hare is still running, bigger and stronger than ever because nobody now dares to stand up and kill it. It has go out of control. The Auschwitz propaganda lie that was starting to run in 1944 is now out of control and it going to take he-men of the kind of stature of Ernst Zündel to kill that particular hare. [Applause]' (p15-16).

(ii) P's foreword to the FPP publication of the Leuchter Report: May 1989

'...Too many hundreds of millions of honest, intelligent people have been duped by the well-financed and brilliantly successful postwar publicity campaign which followed on from the original ingenious plan of the British Psychological Warfare Executive (PWE) in 1942 to spread to the world the propaganda story that the Germans were using 'gas chambers' to kill millions of Jews and other 'undesirables'

(iii) Moers - 9th March 1990

'where did this myth come from? And for me as an Englishman, that is the most interesting question: who invented the myth of the gas chambers? Representatives of the victorious powers. We did it. The English. We invented the lie about the gas chambers, just as we invented the lie about the Belgian children with their hands hacked off in the first World War. The department the committee of the British PWE cabinet, Political Warfare Executive, psychological warfare...' (p 17).

(iv) Latvian Hall, Toronto ... 8th November 1990

'How has this legend been propagated until now? Well, the legend was originally propagated, I think, by us British back in 1942. And I set out the reasons for believing this in my previous talk, 18 months ago. But since 1945, the legend has marched . And this is a great sad facet of war. In wartime, quite justifiably, the warring factions and powers decide to use propaganda, they lie about each other. They lie, massively...When the Victory Day comes, these Ministries of Lies are not replaced by Ministries of Truth. So the old propaganda continues to march on and nobody really has the job of stopping these lies from flooding out. Particularly when some people find they have a vested interest in keeping the lies spewing forth' (p12-13).

(v) Chelsea Town Hall - 15th November 1991

'And if you ask where these legends come from, the trouble is that it comes in fact from us, the British, and we're very good liars. World War II showed this and the Falklands showed it, the Gulf War showed it, we're very good liars and in wartime we have ministers of propaganda whose job it is to lie and in fact we can show quite clearly how this particular lie started in our own Ministry of Propaganda, the Political Warfare Executive and you can go and get the records from the Public Records Office and you can see how we in September, October and November 1942 created the gas chamber lie as a weapon of war, perfectly justified. But the problem with all this is that after the war is over, the Government doesn't set up a Ministry of Truth whose job it is to go around with a bucket and mop cleaning-up all the lies that the Ministry of Information has been spreading and so the lies continue to soldier on. And if they're lies that are very profitable lies, as this particular lie is of course, and I'm not going to go into detail on that there, because then were treading on very thin ice, but it has become a very profitable lie, a lie in fact on which the financial existence of the State of Israel depends, then the lie is not only soldiering on it becomes reinforced and bolstered in a quite extraordinary way" (p 3).